Field
The invention relates to a method for improving ergonomics of a vehicle cockpit so that prior to manufacturing a vehicle, like a car or a motorcycle, a cockpit configuration can be defined that offers improved ergonomic characteristics compared to standard cockpit configurations.
Description of the Related Art
Over the last years, expectations of customers with respect to products they buy have increased. In particular, there is a higher expectation that the chosen product fulfills all the individual needs and meets the preferences the customer has. Thus, product design more and more takes into consideration that the products have to be designed in a way that allows adaptation to the personal preferences of a customer. In many cases, this requires that the personal needs and preferences of the user are defined a long time before the product in the end may be purchased. For example, producing a car takes quite a while and thus, at an early point in time the configuration has to be defined and a later adaptation of the production process is merely impossible.
Nevertheless, personalization in general and also personalization of cars is a hot topic. It is known in the art and described for example in Y. Koren, “Reconfigurable Manufacturing and Beyond” (Summary of a keynote Speech, CIRP 3rd International conference on Reconfigurable Manufacturing, May 2005) that in interaction with a customer a preferred interior of the vehicle can be defined by choosing from a defined set of modules. Of course, these predefined modules take account of physical constraints and thus adaptation to the customer's preferences is limited. Modern manufacturing and assembly techniques offer a wide variety of adaptation of different items in the interior of a vehicle and thus, the selection of modules and definition of a configuration for a particular car or other vehicle becomes complex. When looking at a car for example the variety of the components of the finished product already starts with trivial variability like seat adjustment, but also includes more sophisticated like the individual configuration of the display in the dashboard. But since it is of course easy for the customer to adjust the position of the seat when using the car or choosing a different design on a display which nowadays often replaces a dashboard, such personalization does not need to be known already during the manufacturing process.
However, in contrast to these adaptations, it is also possible that individual adjustment of hardware components is performed regarding the wider vehicle cockpit, meaning also the layout of operation buttons, design and shape of the entire dashboard or the like. Of course, such adaptations have to be defined well before the production of the vehicle. If such adaptation of the entire configuration of the interior of the car is possible or similarly of the cockpit area of a motorcycle, it is evident that changing the configuration has a significant impact on the ergonomics of the vehicle's cockpit. Thus, before the final configuration, which is to be used during the production process, is fixedly defined the customer and the manufacturer has to be sure that the resulting interior of the car with its cockpit area of a motorcycle fulfills the expectations of the customer with respect to the ergonomics during later use of the vehicle.
Thus, it is an object of the present invention to define a method that improves the ergonomics of a vehicle cockpit the configuration of which may be chosen and at least partly freely designed before the production process.
The problem is solved with the method according to the independent claim and further aspects and features are defined in the sub claims.